The Flaming Lips are back today (July 19) with their latest mind-bending excursion into the deepest inner space with the 12-track King’s Mouth: Music and Songs.
The follow-up to 2017’s Oczy Mlody is a companion piece to singer Wayne Coyne’s immersive installation art project of the same name. The Oklahoma band’s 15th studio album is another psychedelic concept album, this one about a king with an enormous head filled with galaxies and its own weather patterns who dies while trying to save his people, who cut his head to display as a tribute.
With narration provided by The Clash’s Mick Jones, the 41-minute album flits from the spare, ethereal “The Sparrow” and glitchy “Giant Baby” to the Pink Floyd-like heartbeat instrumental “Mother Universe,” the pop-adjacent acoustic reverie “How Many Times” and the swirling, big beat maelstrom of “Feedaloodum Beedle Dot.” The collection ends with the spirit-lifting love song to 58 year-old new dad Coyne’s endless childlike wonder at the majesty of the human condition, “How Can a Head,” on which he ponders, “How can a mouth hold so many things?/ All our teeth, all our words, all the songs we sing.” Click here to purchase the album.
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The album, originally released on gold vinyl in a limited edition of 4,000 for this year’s Record Store Day, has garnered high praise for almost scaling to the heights of the Lips’ career-defining, brain-exploding 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin.
Listen to King’s Mouth below.
Watch the “Giant Baby” lyric video and “All For The Life of The City” below.